Volume 2 | Issue 2 | Spring 2002

This issue of Vertigo has been brought together amidst the howl and hell of war in Afghanistan, the more nebulous ‘war on terrorism’, and the struggle in the West to come to terms with the faultlines laid bare by the attacks on New York and Washington. Tragically, nothing in the much-vaunted wizardry of the ‘information revolution’ was able to protect the victims in America or Afghanistan from their fates. Nor have we been able to see much of what has been going on on the ground. Television viewers of the Vietnam War in the seventies may not have realised that they were spectators of both the first and last relatively uncensored war in media history. What we have witnessed in the second year of the new millennium is in every sense a global breakdown in communication and the resort to utterly primitive means to repair it: bombardment into submission.

Content

The dawn of an indigenous Scottish cinema has been proclaimed so often in the last 30 years, only to lapse immediately into perpetual twilight, that the more cynical members of the film community have come to consider it an ideal as likely to be fulfilled as a Scottish victory at the World Cup.

Short film has long been viewed in the UK as a calling card for the feature film lurking within the production team or director. This is no bad thing. What else is a potential funder going to base decisions on? However, shorts have a vitality of their own and can be a fertile source of experimentation, ideas and creativity...

“When Joe first told me about it I asked him, quite simply, ‘What sort of film is it going to be, what sort of film do you want to make?’ He looked at me for a minute, to see that I wasn’t being smart, and then said...

After originally joking that she might spend her time in Antwerp shopping, that was in fact what Siân ended up doing while Frank went off to do his next interview. Antwerp, it seemed, according to the people who knew these things, was the latest fashion capital of Europe.

Last year during the Cannes Film Festival I was standing around the Petit Majestic bar next to an unnamed British filmmaker with two features to his credit. Attempting small talk, I pointed out to him the presence, some thirteen feet away, of the director Lynne Ramsay.

Film distribution has always taken, and continues to take, the lion’s share of the EU’s Media programmes. This is, of course, in recognition of the immense problems faced by filmmakers beyond the Hollywood mainstream in acquiring widespread distribution in their home countries, let alone any where else.

At the 2001 Venice Biennale Chantal Akerman was among several filmmakers who agreed to create an installation that reflected collaboration between film and the visual arts. The result was a piece that played across seven monitors called Woman Sitting Down After Killing.

The film should belong, or seem to belong, to the earth. The film-makers should use only natural light or, at night, sun-gun light. The film should show signs of the berserk or slightly psychotic, an attempt to reflect the human condition.

The creative documentary made for major terrestrial television has virtually died in Britain, assaulted and left for dead by an industry that has jettisoned any serious interest in the world around it in an unsustainable chase after ratings.

The Lux was a perfect antidote to English provincialism. In a city that is supposedly multicultural, one of the few venues that allowed "the others" to find a voice and see daylight is now gone. This is a disaster not only for artists and filmmakers like myself but for the city of London as a whole.

Death from the sky on 11th September immediately challenged humanity with the need to understand. What conditions, political culture, gulfs of misunderstanding and hatred lay behind that immolation? Media commentators implicated their own industries.

British critics have a long tradition of being harsh about British films, and cinema has generally been regarded in Britain as something which happens elsewhere – in Hollywood, continental Europe, Japan or wherever. For example, the first issue of Movie began...

Last November there was a very significant addition to London’s thriving, small-scale festival scene. It celebrated the culture of a people struggling to survive against the competing interests of four nation states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Jerzy Kucia describes his films as emotional documentaries, impressions that conjure up feelings which some people dismiss as nostalgic and others are deeply moved by. Across the Field is a slowly paced and poetic piece. The images are very textured and in black and white.

A fairground scene provides the backdrop and key to the film which spirals round in kaleidoscopic fashion. A Helter-skelter energy of visual and aural images with Plath’s poetry and conversational voice, and a lifetime’s skill of in-camera Bolex super-imposition is perfected to dazzling effect.

Exterior: Office: Day in England. Enter from leftfield Andrew Kötting and Ben Hopkins, shorts-stacked and second time feature-makers, approaching the money men. Maverick anti-traditionalists and yet both wound within the luminous history of film. Keen to tell the end-tales of an uneasy society...

I am, or have until this moment, described myself as an experimental filmmaker. I have always made work specifically to be shown in the cinema. My work reflects very personal and political issues around representation, identity and the language of film.

For most of the world, the human condition is one of fear. Poverty, invasion, disease, famine, bankruptcy, oppression, exploitation, international terrorism and social instability threaten all of us in some way. Most of us survive by developing resistance.

To mark Art and Animation 2002 at Tate Modern and the National Film Theatre, Vertigo is printing an edited excerpt from a conversation between Gareth Evans – a journalist specialising in innovative and experimental media practice; Gary Thomas – Visual Arts Officer at the Arts Council of England...

Self-funded, 16 mm and six years in the making, this politically- engaged, heartfelt and pantheistic three-hour exploration of American responses to the Gulf War is effectively unique in its decision to commit this conflict to celluloid...

I produced my first music video in 1996. The band was Orbital and the star was the classical actress Tilda Swinton, so there was never much chance of The Box either (a) being formulaic or (b) pandering to commercial success.

The construction of “Content” as an idea is perhaps the key to the aesthetic failure of many online film-sites to be anything other than holding areas for a vast range of sub-standard short film-making. The web was envisioned as one big, powerful delivery mechanism, and for a while it existed with hardly anything to deliver...